A Brief History of the United States and the UN Climate Change Negotiations

Demand Climate Justice (2017)

 

"With or without a seat at the table, the U.S. has always been the biggest blocker to progress on climate change."

 

Neoliberalism's climate

Larry Lohmann, The Corner House (2015)

 

"Just as what is regarded as labor, land, health and mobility have changed under neoliberalism, so too has what is regarded as climate. Under previous phases in capitalism, climate was construed as part of a nature external to, yet interfacing with, society – as a condition for accumulation; as a resource; as an object of conservation; as a computer-modellable system. The neoliberal state builds on these conceptions in reconstructing climate also as rentable and marketable units. A thorough grasp of the exploitative and neocolonialist politics that this innovation perpetuates and deepens requires dialogue with indigenous peoples, peasants, workers and their collective history."

 

Not a bedtime story: Climate Change, #Neoliberalism, and the Future of the Arctic

Avi Brisman, Michigan State University (2013)

 

"This dominant world political economy, driven by the ideology and practice of neoliberalism and evidenced by neoliberal economic policies is, as White explains elsewhere, “oriented precisely towards less, rather than more, government regulation of corporate activity. . . . [but] surveillance and use of harsher punitive measures in the case of conventional street crimes have intensified.” “Capitalist globalization,” White continues, “bolstered via neo-liberal state policy, has increased the potential scope of environmentally destructive activities"

 

The Politics of the Carbon Economy

Peter Newell & Matthew Paterson, Sussex University (2009)

 

"We have tried to show that neoliberalism has specific features which have played a key role in structuring climate capitalism. The four key elements we outlined above – its ideological fixation with markets, the dominance of finance in neoliberal capitalism, the widening global economic inequalities, and the focus on networks as a means of organising action, have all combined to shape the character of responses to climate change."

 

Trade unions and climate politics: prisoners of neoliberalism or swords of climate justice?

Dr Paul Hampton, Political Studies Association Conference (2015)

 

"Trade unions are not prisoners of neoliberalism in the realm of climate politics, although they exhibit some accommodation to it. There are more prominent signs that union seek to become swords of climate justice, particularly to effect a just transition to a low carbon economy. More radically, a minority current within trade unionism articulates its own, distinctive, independent and class‐focused climate politics. This has perhaps the greatest potential to break out of the current impasse in climate politics and chart and alternative paths for the emerging climate movement."

 

All that is solid melts into air: climate change and neoliberalism

Guy Shrubsole, Soundings: A journal of politics and culture (2015) ($)

 

"We live in a time of environmental change unprecedented since civilisation began. Industrial society has become a geological force in its own right, ushering in a new epoch: the Anthropocene. Most alarming of all is the threat of human activity leading to irrevocable changes in the global climate. By burning up the Earth’s stock of fossil fuels, we are melting the polar ice caps, causing sea levels to rise and increasing the severity of floods. According to Nicholas Stern, author of the Stern Review on the economics of climate change: ‘Climate change is a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen.'"

 

Neoliberalism, the production of vulnerability and the hobbled state: Systemic barriers to climate adaptation

Glenn Fieldman, Climate and Development (2011) ($)

 

"The neoliberal transformation of the global political–economic system since the mid-1970s has led to profound and increasing inequality and has limited state capacities to tax, regulate and carry out socially supportive public policies. Neoliberalism, or the global institutionalization of laissez-faire economics, has helped to generalize individual and community vulnerability to climate-induced changes and decrease resilience by increasing poverty and thereby limiting options; the global majority face increasingly contingent employment and downward pressure on wages while global economic competition deprives smallholders of their assets. States compete to attract mobile capital by deregulating private activity such as logging and real estate development, increasing climate-related risks to individuals and communities. At the same time, neoliberal limits on the state have inhibited states' ability to fund and coordinate a range of necessary climate adaptations. Finally, neoliberalism undermines social cohesion and thereby limits the potential of civil society to substitute for the diminished state. Reforms to the global neoliberal system are therefore necessary if climate-vulnerable populations are to be protected."

 

A feminist critique of the climate change discourse. From biopolitics to necropolitics?

Ewa Charkiewicz, Climate Change Coalition/DFG (2009)

 

"Last but not least, one of the salient features of neoliberalism is the presumed ‘end of history’ and the age of post-politics. Conveniently, these concepts make power obscure, and enable a shift from discussing causes of social and environmental misery and predicaments, to instead focusing on dealing with their effects (thus pre-empting possibilities to deal with the causes). An example of this is the abandonment of any debate on changes in consumption and production patterns that was perceived as central to addressing causes of global environmental crisis back in the days of Rio (chapter 4 of Agenda 21) which are now purged from political agendas or relocated to the market in the form of consumer responsibility. Talk of emission volumes, emission reduction scenarios, estimations of mitigation costs, all this focuses the climate change discourse on effects, while the in-depth causes of climate change are removed from the agenda. Analogically, to earlier end of pipe policies, new techno-fiscal strategies do not decouple economic growth from environmental pressures, and continue to socialize the risks and costs of ecological crises to households, while benefits of economic growth and income from markets increasingly accrue to small privileged group with economic and political resources."

 

The Unbearable Lightness of Politics: Climate Change Denial and Political Polarization

Robert J. Antonio & , TRobert J. Brullehe Sociology Quarterly (2011)

 

"The most pressing danger with regard to climate change and other serious ecological issues is failing to get them on the national agenda and to entertain strategies to cope with them. Repression is more likely when unattended crises erupt into chaos and conflict. However, polarization exists with respect to other major issues that are perceived to impact on American life in more immediate ways than warming—financial problems, economic inequality, and unemployment. The gridlock over these matters and unserious posturing about them diminish the sense of shared fate and community needed to face the sweeping changes that warming ultimately demands. It will be hard to mobilize people for climate change mitigation unless it is done in concert with efforts to engage these other pressing problems, which also have been generated or at least exacerbated by neoliberal globalization.

 

The situation calls for collective action and mobilization of civil society to initiate state intervention, reconstruct social liberalism, or another yet to be imagined alternative policy regime, to redefine liberty, bring it more into balance with equality, and create more just, sustainable alternatives to the growth imperative and capitalism as we have known them.Coping with ecological crises requires a critical discourse that has been precluded by neoliberal governance and culture. Recognizing that we are embedded in the biosphere compels envisioning a possible post-neoliberal community that cultivates awareness of our social interdependence and responsibility to fellow human beings, future generations, and other life on the planet. This sense of collective fate could be forged in efforts to illuminate what confronts us, form strategies to deal with it, and in the shared intensity of collective action aimed to alter our relations to others and to nature. All this may sound utopian, but globalization and its environmental wall has changed the scenario—in a “full world,” where global resource consumption is extended to hundreds of millions or billions more people, continuous, unplanned exponential growth simply cannot be sustained."

 

Neoliberalism Exasperates the Problem of Climate Change

William Holden, Kathleen Nadeau, Emma Porio, Ecological Liberation Theology (2017) ($)

 

"Since the mid-1970s an aggressive new strain of capitalism has come to dominate the world and it is called “neoliberalism.” The word “liberalism” is used because neoliberalism looks back to the classical economists, such as Adam Smith, for its inspiration but it is an aggressive new variant of liberalism lacking the empathy for other humans that the classical economists articulated; consequently, the prefix “neo” is added to the word “liberalism".

 

A feminist approach to climate change governance: Everyday and intimate politics

Beth A. Bee, Jennifer Rice and Amy Trauger, Geography Compass (2015)

 

"The detachment of neoliberal climate governance from everyday spaces and subjectivities ignores and obscures the lived experiences, knowledges, access, responsibilities, and roles that make up the actual subjects and subject positions that are gendered, classed, raced, and otherwise differently situated. This detachment simultaneously permits the construction of the ideal neoliberal citizen, the citizen-consumer, whose individual actions in the private spaces of the home and the market become appropriate solutions to climate change (Macgregor 2014). As MacGregor (2014) argues, a consideration of the ways in which the neoliberal enclosure of the public sphere has displaced any engagement with climate change into the private sphere is appropriate for a feminist analysis. Consequently, the apolitical fictitious actor, devoid of actually existing subjectivity, whose actions within the market and the household are assumed to offset carbon emissions, become little more than sites of capital accumulation. We argue that a feminist epistemology is useful for understanding why individual action and behavior change are not sufficient to combat global climate change, and in fact, may actually reinforce the unequal power relations and logics that underlie the problem in the first place."

 

The Neoliberal Climate Change Policy of Australia – A critical review from the Marxist Perspective

Dr. Kamleshwer Lohana, Mehran University of Engineering & Technology, Pakistan (2015)

 

"This essay will argue that successive Australian federal governments have been influenced by mining and related corporations to implement neoliberal economic policy that opposes climate change legislation. A process that serves their capitalist interests. This has resulted in environmental harm and social welfare issues for Australian society."

 

The Capitalist Mode of Conservation, Neoliberalism and the Ecology of Value

Noel Castree & George Henderson, Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry (2014)

 

"A full history of how ‘free market environmentalism’ has eclipsed other ways of managing nature has yet to be written.1 It is doubtless a messy story of how ideological belief, pragmatism and serendipity combined to discredit the ‘visible hand’ of the state approach. However, what’s clear is that the global financial crisis of 2008-9, the alarming results of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) and the unequivocal conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th Assessment Report (2007) have emboldened its advocates rather than sowed seeds of doubt. In their view greening the global economy is the best way to properly value the increasingly scarce gifts of nature (such as whales and fresh water). It could also, they hope, initiate a new long wave of growth based on ‘clean technologies,’ delivering ‘development’ in both North and South. The self-same rationality that has led to species extinction, polluted oceans and melting ice sheets can, with government as a hand-maiden, assume a new eco-friendly form – so the argument goes."

 

Neoliberal Sustainability? The Biopolitical Dynamics of “Green” Capitalism

Karijn van den Berg, International Institute of Social Studies (2016)

 

"To conclude, the discourse that has been explored throughout this paper of green capitalism and sustainable citizenship form a harmful discourse, a new bio-political strategy, that both sustains the neoliberal principles and agenda, as well as gives subjects the illusion of sustainable choice-making on a consumer level, only available to certain specific subjects. Through these “cool” choice-making practices neoliberalism gets green credits, for promoting a form of sustainability that in fact has a hidden agenda. And although appearing sympathetic it does not change the root causes of environmental degradation such as exploitation, profiting, injustice and over-consumption. It creates the illusion of sustainability, while the only thing it seems to sustain is a neoliberal economic situation, as it shifts responsibilities for climate change and environmental degradation to an individual level. On this level the individual is reduced to a consumer, through the promotion of trendy “green” lifestyles without any real effects, while actual people die and are scattered over a warming planet. Sustainable citizenship thus seems to sustain neoliberal principles by giving subjects, and only those who obtained this “citizenship”, the illusion of and responsibility for sustainable choice making on a consumer level. This is hugely problematic as the focus on “green” lifestyle choices is largely predicated on privilege and incorrectly assigns blame to individuals, who become redefined and recognized as consumers only."

 

Health and the Embodiment of Neoliberalism: Pathologies of Political-Economy from Climate Change and Austerity to Personal Responsibility

 

"Neoliberalism is commonly understood in terms of the expanding global influence of disembodied market forces and rationalities. However, unlike the invisible hands and competitive calculations it unleashes on the world, neoliberalism’s implications for health are neither intangible nor abstract. Instead, they are materially embodied in ways that are deeply consequential for life and death"

 

"Climate change is viewed by many health scholars as “the biggest global health threat of the 21st century” (Costello et al. 2009). Even if the ties to neoliberalization are not always noted, the health risks of climate change can also in turn be examined as being increased and intensified by neoliberal developments globally (Goodman 2014). The freeing-up of market capitalism has undoubtedly freed-up additional carbon as gas and put it straight into the atmosphere creating the basic conditioning effect – the greenhouse effect – needed to create anthropogenic climate change. The liberalization in neoliberalization takes on a whole new meaning in this regard."

 

Discourse as ideology: Neoliberalism and the limits of international forest policy

David Humphreys, Forest Policy and Economics (2009)

 

"Neoliberalism, which is best understood as a discourse that promotes the rights of capital and investors, aims to dismantle regulation so that capital can invest in hitherto public domains, such as schools, post offices, publicly-owned protected areas and public forestlands. Neoliberal discourse structures international forest policy towards some outcomes, such as an increased role for the private sector, the use of markets and voluntary commitments, rather than others, such as national and international regulation with a tough emphasis on environmental standards, legally binding quantitative targets and sanctions."

 

The Globalization of Neoliberalism, its Consequences, and Some of its Basic Alternatives

Claudia von Werlhof, Capitalism Nature Socialism (2008)

 

"Neoliberalism has turned everything that would ensure a good life for all beings on this planet upside down. Many people still have a hard time understanding that the horror we are experiencing is indeed a reality*a reality willingly produced, maintained and justified by ‘‘our’’ politicians. But even if the alternative was half implemented*no more plundering, exploitation, destruction, violence, war, coercion, mercilessness, accumulation, greed, corruption*we would still be left with all the damage that the earth has already suffered. The earth is not the paradise it was 500 years ago, 200 years ago, or even 100 years ago.

 

The devastation has been incredible: enormous volumes of our drinking water are disappearing due not only to the melting of the glaciers and polar caps but also because we are polluting and drawing down groundwater sources much faster than they can replenish; our climate is increasingly unstable, causing catastrophes that have already killed millions and threaten much greater numbers; depletion of the ozone layer means that our atmosphere is no longer protected against ultraviolet radiation; we are currently witnessing species’ extinction rates of between 100 to 10,000 times that of prehuman levels;114 most cultures and their knowledge are destroyed; most natural resources exhausted. And all this happened within what amounts to a nanosecond of the earth’s history."

 

Free Trade and Climate Change

Mary Lou Malig, Focus on the Global South (slides)

 

"The current neoliberal economic system has to be replaced if we are to fight climate change and achieve climate justice"

 

Conservation’s Friends in High Places: Neoliberalism, Networks, and the Transnational Conservation Elite

George Holmes, Global Environment Politics (2011)

 

"Most discussions of hegemony in global conservation assess the dominance of neoliberalized strategies that present market solutions as the only way forward. Conservation is now considered not a bulwark against capitalist expansion, but part of it. Much of this takes inspiration from ideas of a sustainable development historical bloc, arguing that conservation has become incorporated into global capitalism’s dominance by offering capitalist solutions to the environmental problems created by capitalism. Conservation has had a long and fruitful relationship with capitalism, yet advocates for market-based capitalism and arguments that only market-led solutions will save biodiversity have never been so dominant. Given its prominent role in promoting neoliberalized conservation, we must consider the transnational conservation elite when discussing the hegemony of neoliberalized conservation."

 

NatureTM Inc.: Changes and Continuities in Neoliberal Conservation and Market-based Environmental Policy

Murat Arsel and Bram Buscher, Development and Change (2011)

 

"Neoliberal conservation policies necessarily see economic growth as a solution to the problems created by development because the hegemony of neoliberalism rests on its putative discrediting of ‘Keynesian and welfare state regimes’. Whether capitalist dynamics can indeed be regulated by Keynesian and welfare state regimes to universalize the material benefits of development without undermining the ability of global ecosystems to thrive remains a fundamental question facing policy makers and social scientists alike."

 

Australia’s sustainable energy transition: The disjointed politics of decarbonisation

 

"This paper considers Australia’s climate and energy policies over the period 1988–2013 and assesses the degree to which these two policy domains have co-evolved to define Australia’s low carbon energy trajectory. It finds that climate policy and energy policy have largely been dissociated from one another. This failure of policy coordination and integration has been caused in part by attempts to reconcile clashing and competing neoliberal and weak ecological modernization discourses, and is reflected in the diverging goals and paths of each policy domain. The inability of Australian governments to define and articulate a coherent narrative around a low-carbon energy future has consequently constrained Australia’s sustainable energy transition and led to contradictory and disjointed outcomes"

 

Neoliberalism, Slow Violence, and the Environmental Picaresque

Rob Nixon, Modern Fiction Studies, Johns Hopkins University Press (2009)

 

"At stake here is the role of neoliberal globalization in exacerbating both uneven economic development and the uneven development of official memory. What we witness is a kind of fatal bigotry that operates through the spatializing of time, by offloading risk onto "backward" communities that are barely visible in the official media. Contemporary global politics, then, must be recognized "as a struggle for crude, material dominance, but also (threaded ever closer into that struggle) as a battle for the control over appearances" (Boal 31). That battle over spectacle becomes especially decisive for public memory—and for the foresight with which public policy can motivate and execute precautionary measures—when it comes to the attritional casualties claimed, as at Bhopal, by the forces of slow violence."

 

Opening and closing the future: climate change, adaptation, and scenario planning

Rickards, Lauren; Ison, Ray; F¨unfgeld, Hartmut & Wiseman, John, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy (2014)

 

"Three criteria are articulated in the well-known “Great transitions” report of the Global Scenarios Group about global futures, initiated in 1995 following the Rio Earth Summit. Incorporating the economy–environment tension mentioned above, it explores three pairs of scenarios, named: conventional worlds (market forces, policy reform); great transition (ecocommunalism, new sustainability paradigm); and barbarisation (breakdown, fortress world, presented as an outcome of a market forces world). As the name of the project suggests, it was explicit about favouring the most ecocentric alternatives, the great transition worlds. Beyond this explicit normative element, the scenario project served as a political and intellectual intervention by simply illustrating that the conventional world was not inevitable, helping to raise “questions that otherwise might not be asked”. Nevertheless, twenty years later, it appears that its vision or warnings have not been heeded, in keeping with reported difficulty in applying scenario insights to present-day decision making. Instead, the ‘green economy’ turn of the UNCSD suggests that reality most closely reflects the market forces scenario, with even the term ‘transition’ now generally used to refer to “futures that reconfigure, but do not transform, assumed neoliberal futures”. This is despite the fact that, in the great transitions modelling, the market forces scenario leads to barbarisation."

 

Racing climate change: Collaboration and conflict in California’s global climate change policy arena

Jonathan London, Alex Karner, Julie Sze, Dana Rowan, Gerardo Gambirazzio, & Deb Niemeier, Global Environmental Change (2013)

 

"This article examines the drivers and the manifestations of these dynamics of collaboration and conflict between environmental justice advocates and state regulators, and pays particular attention to the scalar and racialized quality of the neoliberal discourse. The contentiousness of climate change politics in California offers scholars and practitioners around the world a cautionary tale of how the best intentions for integrating environmental justice principles into climate change policy do not necessarily translate into implementation and how underlying racialized fractures can upend collaboration between state and social movement actors."

 

Submission on Advancing Climate Action in Queensland Discussion Paper

Rose Adams, Submission on Advancing Climate Action in Queensland Discussion Paper (2016)

 

"This discussion paper contains many admirable strategies and identifies key areas in which reform is needed. Taking the broader view, the government needs to consider the inherent problems in the current economic paradigm that views continual growth as the desirable path, fueled by increasing exploitation of resources and served by an ever-growing population. In a finite world this situation in untenable. In reading Fieldman, the challenges faced by any government to undertake any meaningful climate change reform face multiple challenges from conservative elements, including those within the government itself. He argues that “the neoliberal system produces vulnerability to climate-induced (and other) changes and effectively incapacitates effective responses. Adaptation policy is not something that can simply be tacked onto, or absorbed into, neoliberal development policy more broadly, because “development as presently conceived and practiced is itself maladaptive.”

 

Neoliberalism and the Environmental Movement: Contemporary Considerations for the Counter Hegemonic Struggle

Austen K. Bernier, University of Colorado (2016)

 

"In the modern day, many social movements have rallied around environmental issues in response to an impending environmental crisis. The antipathy of neoliberal hegemony towards environmental regulation has set it in opposition with environmental movements and as such many factions of the movement can be described as ‘counter hegemonic’. As neoliberalism constricts the political opportunity structure of these movements through domestic and international legislation and treaties, assimilation of loci of dissent into a neoliberal framework, and powerful financial coercion, limitations on environmental movement influence may yield dire consequences for the global environment."

 

An Eco-Feminist Perspective on the Climate Change Regime

Atieno Mboya, University of Baltimore (2016)

 

"Climate change, which threatens both traditional livelihoods in the South and the carbonbased economies of the North, presents an opportunity for states to move away from a dichotomous developed/developing country response to the problem and instead operationalize an approach that upholds the oneness and interconnectedness of the planet and of the human and non-human species that inhabit it. The norms of the climate change regime, while progressive and promising in themselves, cannot result in an equitable and successful result given the neoliberal response framework that the international community is pursuing. Neoliberalism is an ethic of winners and losers; climate change, if not reined in by a decisive reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, will leave no human winners. Consequently, a different operationalizing rationale that can give life to the norms of the regime needs to be tried. Ecofeminism, which calls for the replacement of hierarchical dualisms with diversity, domination with equity, and encourages relationship and cooperation, can open up new ways for states to respond"

 

Revealing the patriarchal sides of climate change through feminist critical discourse analysis: a case study from Nicaragua

Noémi Gonda, Central European University, Hungary (2015)

 

"In Nicaragua three important features distinguish current post-neoliberal politics (2007-nowadays) from previous neoliberal ones (1990-2007): (i) increased efforts to reduce poverty and exclusion, central concerns in social policies and not seen as possible through the trickle-down effects of economic growth; (ii) the environment is not seen as only supposed to serve economic growth, rather it is conceptualized as mutually constitutive with humans and; (iii) encouragement of citizen participation in decision- making and service delivering. In particular, women are made visible in the policy discourse and seen through their figures of nurturing mothers when it comes to environmental management."

 

Neoliberal Policies and Human Rights

Prof. Michael Freeman, revised version of two lectures given at Dokuz Eylul University Law School, Turkey (2016)

 

"Climate change, like neoliberalism, is largely a product of the rich countries. Climate change may well be the most important outcome – and negative externality – of neoliberal policies. Some climate change experts believe that climate change is already violating the human rights of perhaps hundreds of thousands of human beings. Neoliberalism cannot solve the problem of climate change. It is not clear who can; however, this may prove to be the most difficult human rights challenge of all."

 

Ecocide: A Short History of the Mass Extinction of Species

Franz J. Broswimmer, Pluto Press (2002)

 

"This most recent historical phase of ecocide corresponds to the formal ending of the imperial era of capitalism. The rich countries of the global North have embarked on the neo-liberal project of global deregulation and marketization.. In short, neo-liberal globalization constitutes the last and most destructive phase of global industrialization, an era that the economist Ernest Mandel calls “late capitalism,” or “global capitalism.”

 

"Neo-liberal globalization is perhaps manifested most starkly through the chilling fact that more forest fires burned in any single year of the last decade of the twentieth century than in all of human history. In the process, these fires irreparably destroyed precious biodiversity resulting from millions of years of evolution."

 

"Since the late 1970s, the top 15 Third World debtor nations have tripled the rate of exploitation of their forests – a phenomenon undoubtedly related to their pressing need to gain foreign exchange to make interest payments. Indonesia and Brazil, two heavily indebted countries of the world that also happened to contain much of the planet’s remaining virgin tropical forests, saw their rates of deforestation increase by 82 per cent and 245 per cent respectively.17 Hence, it should come as no surprise that the speed of destruction of the world’s centers of biodiversity has greatly accelerated since the onslaught of neo-liberal forces starting in the 1980s."

 

Systemic Crisis and Systemic Change in the United States in the 21st Century

Gar Alperovitz, James Gustave Speth, Ted Howard, & Joe Guinan, The Next System (2016)

 

"These deep-seated trends in our political economy have been more than thirty years in the making. Ultimately they are traceable to massive worldwide economic forces—financialization, the “great doubling” of global labor markets, and corporate downsizing and restructuring—unleashed with the breakdown of the postwar international economic order and the ascent of a neoliberal policy framework intent on deregulation, privatization, and de-unionization. The upshot has been a cycle of boom-and-bust leading eventually to secular stagnation in the longer-term, with real wages stalling and deep cutbacks in social provision, in no small part due to steep decline in the strength of unions"

 

"In the words of Pope Francis, “The exploitation of the planet has already exceeded acceptable limits and we still have not solved the problem of poverty.” The large-scale institutions we build to support a more democratic and sustainable future will have to transcend the Wall Street-driven growth imperative. We also need new indicators that can serve as accurate measures of social and environmental health and quality of life. Gross Domestic Product (GDP), our most important economic indicator, singularly fails to account for environmental values."